The Jesus Papers

Intriguing. Compelling. Disturbing. Reasonable. All of these and more.

Michael Baigent has been much in the news lately, given his failed lawsuit again Dan Brown in a Paris court. The Jesus Papers, based on a largely heuristic argument, is likely to garner additional notoriety for Baigent. The April 15, 2006 Charlotte Observer carried its weekly column by Reverend Billy Graham, "In My Opinion." A reader questioned whether Jesus died on the cross. Graham's answer was, "It is not logical." There were too many witnesses. Soldiers, who had observed hundreds of deaths, would have been in serious trouble if they did not confirm his death, according to Graham's answer.

Faith-Based History

It is this conundrum Baigent answers in a carefully reasoned argument, but it is an argument based on faith, and, as we shall see later, based in part on a hoax. It is ironic that we must accept so much on faith in order to cast out nearly 2,000 years of official Christian faith. Hard documentary evidence remains, "tantalizingly, just out of reach."

Here is the basic assertion. Jesus was a real man with siblings. On his father's side Jesus was descended from the line of David, King of Israel. On his mother's side he was descended from Aaron, the high priest. He was, therefore, a doubly legitimate messiah from the temporal and spiritual lines. His "death" on the cross was manufactured by his followers. He "died" when he was given a solution of drugs in the sponge. Taken down from the cross, he was quickly removed to a tomb owned by one of his supporters and conveniently located nearby, where he was revived. Even the Koran (IV, 155ff) speaks of a rigged crucifixion, according to Baigent. He married Mary Magdalene and lived happily thereafter in the South of France.

A group called the Zealots is the key. They wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and were Judean freedom fighters in Baigent's view. Jesus grew up among them, and at least two of his disciples were Zealots, Simon Zelotes and Judas Iscariot. It is this political aspect that is excluded from the New Testament, "a sanitized, censored, and often inverted view of the time." It was a view which steadily removed Jesus from his Jewish context and ultimately led theologians and artists to depict him as a blond, blue-eyed European.


Read Critically

Baigent urges readers to proceed deliberately through this theoretical wonderland, to give thought to each chapter and the "proof" it offers. The problem lies in the lack of hard evidence, which he acknowledges. He saw and took pictures of some ancient scrolls. The scrolls disappeared. The pictures disappeared in the British Museum, and he had no extra copies. A Church of England vicar says there is proof that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45 and that this document was known by Abbe Beranger Sauniere at Rennes le Chateau around 1885. And, suddenly, we are propelled back to Baigent's earlier book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and its connections to The Da Vinci Code.

With odd bits of information in hand, Baigent offers a number of conjectural proofs. He examines the political situation and characterizes Rome's (i.e., the Catholic Church) greatest fear that the real Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith are very different, a proposition threatening to traditional religion. The events surrounding the crucifixion were, indeed, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. The two men crucified on either side of Jesus were actually Zealots, not "thieves," yet another word poorly translated. Tunnels in the ancient community of Baia, just outside Naples reveal the cusp between the world of the living and the dead. They provide for incubation, a dream or vision, by enabling the adherent to retreat into a world of dark and quiet. And, there is much more, but is it proof?